


Heinold's First and Last Chance

by lovetincture



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-06
Updated: 2020-12-06
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:27:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27914521
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovetincture/pseuds/lovetincture
Summary: A shared drink, a dark bar, a night on the water.
Relationships: Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester
Comments: 4
Kudos: 24





	Heinold's First and Last Chance

**Author's Note:**

> This is a placey sort of fic. It's a love letter to a city I miss more than it's anything else. It feels like a good time in the world for some indulgence.

“Heinold’s First and Last Chance Saloon, huh?” Dean says. “First and last chance for what?”

“For a drink,” Sam says, standing a little closer to be heard over the dull drone of the evening bar crowd. “In the prohibition days, Alameda was a dry city. Time was, this port was your first and last chance for a drink before crossing city lines or shipping out to sea.”

“Huh,” Dean says.

Sam turns his attention back to the bar. It’s cramped in here. The ceiling and floor are both built at an angle, and it makes him feel like he has to hunch his shoulders the way he hasn’t done since high school just to fit. Fitting. Fitting in. He takes his pint of beer and hands Dean his, and they stand off to one side, awkward in the low light, jostled every few seconds by kids who look too young to possibly be in college.

They sip their beer. It tastes like copper. Reminds him of blood, but with a better head. Dean peels himself away from the wall and moves outside onto the patio, and Sam follows wordlessly. They sit and drink their drinks. Sam enjoys the way the cold off the water bites into his skin where it’s exposed—face and hands, the sliver of his throat. When they finish, Dean goes back inside to get them another round.

“Hey, you got a light?” A girl leans into Sam, young like the rest of them, fresh-faced even under the dark makeup smudged around her eyes, sweet even with her lips stained like blood.

She smells boozy and clean, the scent of her cigarettes whisked away on the cold harbor air. He can’t imagine ever looking that young, that doe-eyed and innocent. He probably never did.

“No,” he says. “Sorry.”

She mumbles something that he doesn’t quite catch.

Dean has a light. Dean’s got his Zippo tucked into a pocket, right next to his knife and the packets of salt he’d grabbed from the last burger place they’d eaten at. He could’ve said so, but instead he says nothing, watching the girl totter away on her high-heeled shoes, off to talk to a cluster of hipsters smoking beneath the planters. She hunkers down with them. There’s the flare of a lighter and the glowing, lit end of another cigarette. Their teeth flash straight and white when they laugh.

Dean comes back with their beers, presses another sweating glass into Sam’s hands, and Sam’s glad to have a reason to drag his eyes away.

“Something?” Dean asks, nodding his head in the direction of the kids.

Sam shakes his head. “Nothing.”

There’s a sign informing them that all alcohol must stay inside the patio, but the patio is nothing more than a little square cordoned off with a flimsy, white plastic chain. Sam wants to get away from the smell of smoke, the scent of something herbal and dank rising through the air. He has to breathe in the fumes of lighter fluid and decaying remains on the job; he doesn’t have to do it on their downtime too.

There’s no one around to tell them to stop, so Sam starts toward the water, and Dean falls into step beside him. They walk toward the pier, empty save for the occasional couple walking close, heads down and bent together. They keep walking, out past the halogen glow of the streetlamps up above and into the untamed dark beyond. They find a slope of craggy rocks that lead into the water. They pick their way across slippery rock faces and sit down, watching the tide wash in, nothing more than ripples in the dark.

The bay smells like garbage. Like trash and brine and something vegetal, washed up and decaying. Sam takes a sip of his beer. He feels Dean shift beside him.

“So, vacation, huh?”

Sam laughs, low and dark. The sound is soft and pretty much absent humor, but it still makes Dean smile beside him. “Some vacation.”

The truth is neither one of them knows how to relax—not really, not for a long time now—the same way neither of them really know how to sleep. Sam finds himself jerking awake on nights when he’s been sleeping too long, fists up, ready to fight some unseen menace. Peace is hard for his body to understand.

Dean butts his shoulder up against Sam’s, and it’s meaningless in a pleasant way—it means nothing, and it doesn’t have to mean anything because they have the rest of their lives. They’ve had their whole lives up til now, and they’ll have everything after, too.

Sam takes another swig of his beer—longer this time, nearly draining the glass—and looks out across the black water.

He doesn’t do well with California anymore. It’s not the memories—he’d never been to Oakland with Jess. They’d made it as far as visiting her folks out in Marin, walked across the Golden Gate Bridge and took pictures, spent a happy afternoon walking through Chinatown and sipping coffee at a place that actually gave you truffles, but Oakland scared her.

He doesn’t blame her. Didn’t have a way to tell her then that he could have kept her safe from anything. Didn’t have to eat his words when it turned out not to be true after all. The thought of Jess always makes his mouth taste like ash. He’s at the bottom of his beer and has no problem plucking Dean’s straight out of his hands and taking a gulp of his, blatantly obnoxious, just to take the taste away.

“Hey!” Dean says, right on cue, shoving at Sam and snatching his beer straight out of Sam’s hand. “Get your own.”

Sam laughs, happy because it feels good to needle Dean. Because it makes sense to talk shit and pull at his pigtails; it’s little brother shit, worked firmly into his DNA. “But yours is right here.”

“Punk,” Dean grumbles.

“You love it.”

They sit and watch the lights winking across the far side of the bay in the minutes before the fog swallows them back up. Dean passes the beer back to Sam, wordless, and Sam takes a sip and hands it back.

They’ll abandon the glasses here when they go, leave them nestled in the rocks to get broken to glittering pieces or collected by some drifter. Just another small sign that the Winchesters were here. Just another bit of entropy in the universe, just two more things out of place.

**Author's Note:**

> [Twitter]()


End file.
